Shasta Ventures Doubles Down On Enterprise Software Experience With New Hires

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Shasta Ventures is doubling down on enterprise software experience with the additions of Zenprise CEO Jayaram Bhat as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) and Issac Roth as Venture Advisor at the early-stage venture firm. As the company tells us, this is a move to grow Shasta’s enterprise software, cloud and SaaS practice.

New EIR Jayaram Bhat hails from enterprise mobile security company Zenprise, where he was CEO. Zenprise was recently acquired by Citrix. Prior to Zenprise, Bhat was a corporate consultant and was Vice President of Marketing at Mercury Interactive Corporation. He was also a member of the board of Electric Cloud and Tealeaf, which was acquired by IBM in 2012.

Roth, who was formerly at open source enterprise giant Red Hat, is joining Shasta as a venture advisor. At Red Hat, he helped create OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service. OpenShift was based on Makara, a Shasta-backed company which Roth co-founded (and Red Hat acquired). Roth was also instrumental in Red Hat’s investments in Appcelerator and 10gen. Prior to founding Makara, he spent five years at Wily Technology and CA Technologies.

Shasta already has an impressive portfolio of enterprise investments, including Anaplan, Apptio, Crittercism, Lithium, Typesafe, Zenprise and Zuora, but as managing director Jason Pressman explains, Roth and Bhat’s expertise only adds value to the firm’s practice. He adds that he expects both individuals to either start or join an enterprise startup that Shasta will back.

We’re seeing more VC firms staff up with enterprise expertise as investor sentiment focuses in on the space. General Catalyst just brought on former VMware CTO Steve Herrod, and we’re likely to see more of these hires in the industry.